I noticed that a few of the startups I’ve been talking to at SXSW and in Silicon Valley were using signup pages powered by LaunchRock.

I was sharing a co-working space with Josh, the co founder of FlyByMiles. He was a finalist in the StartupBus challenge on the Silicon Valley Bus, and was working on his new website. He had a Launchrock page.

The day before, I met Zombies In Real Life, a Sydney based startup that won the Startmate Challenge. They also had a Launchrock page for beta invites.

If you have a business idea, usually the first thing that most people will do is buy the URL. Well, the next thing you need to do is sign up to a LaunchRock page! So rather than have a domain registrar holding page like a boring godaddy page with affiliate links, or a holding page with “come back here later”, you should create a launchrock page and start signing people up for beta invites. It only take a couple of minutes to create a page and it appears that you can customise it as well.

Its a very simple idea but killer. So many new websites need it. I’ve noticed that you don’t need to have a very complex idea to be successful. Create something simple and intuitive to use – look at Dropbox. The technology stack might be complex in the backend, but for the user its so convenient to use. The LaunchRock or Dropbox idea is not new, its been around for a while. But they seem to make the experience easy to use and possibly do it better than anyone else. More on this later.

As more startups launch using LaunchRock, they’ll probably have the inside running on new companies and goss on what’s new! For now, check out the Discover LaunchRock page for what was hot at SXSW 2011. I’m sure they’ll soon have their own discovery page made up of new startups on LaunchRock.

For more on LaunchRock, check out their blog on how it works.

I’m out like GoDaddy pages,

Matt Ho.
@inspiredworlds